Police confiscate German Pirate Party’s servers

In the morning of May 20th 2011, German police confiscated a number of servers of the German Pirate Party which are provided by AixIT in Offenbach, for a French investigation.The action follows a request for help issued by French authorities.

On that matter, the Board stated:

The Board of the Pirate Party of Germany will support, within it’s legal obligations, the French authorities in their investigation. Access to the technical infrastructure has been provided as far as necessary for the investigation. Thereby, the targeted search for specific datasets should be established.

At the moment, the Board does not expect delinquency on behalf of the Pirate Party. Investigation is not directed against the party or any of its subsidiaries, they are only involved as the server’s operators. The results are expected with curiosity. According to our own standards, the Board will report on the incident in all transparency and detail as soon as it has affirmed information.

The Board does not have information that indicate the necessity to take all servers of the Pirate Party off-line. According to the information it has been provided with, only one single public service on a virtual server of the party was affected. The disconnection of all servers is a massive intrusion into the communications infrastructure of the sixth largest party in Germany. Considering the state elections taking place in Bremen in two days, this caused a severe political damage, which the Board condemns decisively.

In relation to the ongoing investigations, it will have to be verified whether the issued search warrant was actually appropriate, especially whether the principle of proportionality was followed. After all, this action has led to a large-scale breakdown of the technical infrastructure of the Pirate Party Germany. It will also have to be verified whether data have been affected that have no relation to the French investigation.

The Board apologises for any inconvenience and will now focus mainly on the recovery of the impacted server infrastructure.